dead sea fruit
by roxangst
Summary: "There are some eyes, can eat you." — character study anthology.
1. i) axel, roxas

**i.**

axel is pyrolysis -

he is the spark, the heat, the scorch,  
leaving crackling ozone in his wake.

his eyes are the green of premature apples,  
bone-sharp angles, skin tasting of pennies beneath the tongue.  
his body is quasi-formed shapes and his hair is gore,  
torrid red spikes and gangly monster limbs.

his inferno burns as fast and ephemeral  
as summer sparklers.

roxas is the wind;  
he is the air, the oxygen  
affixed to the slick lining of axel's throat,  
flowing through four cardiac chambers into  
veins, nerves and arteries until  
the rhythm pounds in his ears.

axel looks at roxas and he can almost breathe again,  
feel the weight of fresh air entering his lungs,  
flowing from pulmonis to alveolus until it warms the vacant cavern  
buried behind his rib cage.

roxas is oxygen and axel is fire,  
and the flames burn higher and higher and higher.


	2. ii) xion, roxas, axel

**ii**.

there are ocean floors crusted beneath your eyelids,  
irises the colour of bruises and cyanosis and gentians.

your scowl is perfectly chiseled like a statue,  
like an archangel prayed to on skinned knees,  
your wings long clipped.

sometimes, you think you're in love with a girl with indian ink lines of hair,  
eyes blue as salt-water, the eyes of a woman buried at sea.  
you know who you are —  
you're roxas, you're 15, you've lived in twilight town your whole life.  
but somehow, you want to know  
what it would feel like to press chapped lips  
to her thalassa mouth,  
her bubblegum lips tainted blue and sticky  
with ice cream beneath a sunset.

sometimes,  
you think you love a man in a dark black coat zipped tight to his throat;  
a redhead with corded muscles and pectorals protruding proudly forward,  
telling of strength, cunning, danger.  
his voice sends goosebumps down your spine,  
loud, velvet-lined and harsh as the element he commands; deceptive.  
you know you should _know_ something about axel, but all you remember is —  
(_"you'll always be my best friend, roxas."  
"best friends don't lie to each other!"_)  
— white white noise like the crackle of a fire, and your head begins to ache.

you don't remember the girl when you see the man called axel —  
you don't remember sugary-soft butterfly kisses against the column of your throat,  
or hair dark as ink, perfumed with peppermint.  
you only know her whilst you dream,  
remembering traces of her for seconds upon awakening.  
for six days, you wake up clutching tight to your sheets,  
reaching beside you to clamber about for sea shells and trinkets —  
("_i went to a new world today, roxas! you should have seen it!"_)  
— your fingers grasping empty space.


	3. iii) axel, roxas

axel's biggest regret is that  
for all the leagues of cold, cold sea  
embodied in roxas's stare,  
for all the fathoms and fathoms of indigo blue,  
it isn't quite enough.

roxas's eyes are the blue of the dragonfly hair clip  
they found one mission to the land of dragons —  
an old woman tells roxas that he is of water,  
a conqueror of fire and earth and calamity,  
that he will carve his own path.

but all the blue in those eyes cannot douse  
axel's inferno, and when everything is over  
and the red clears from his vision, axel sees and he knows  
and he knows and he knows and he knows and  
he does something he hasn't done for nearly ten years.

axel cries, cries, cries, but  
his tears aren't the correct shade of blue.  
he screams and he clutches at the ashes  
of a boy who used to be, golden and  
glutted with waning light.

— _let's meet again, in the next life._

the mansion collapses in on itself,  
and no bodies are exhumed.

who would ever mourn the inexistent?


	4. iv) xion, kairi, naminé

When Xion touches herself, she wonders at the ministrations of the hand she supposedly controls, the groping clutches and heated slides as her fingers probe deeper, manifesting herself in ways she feels she shouldn't.

She's long learned how she likes it, with little to no penetration and a strong affinity to her clit, the little bud rising steadily beneath her kneading. She doesn't mention it to Axel or Roxas, how sometimes on the clocktower she watches them together, heads bowed together and laughter mingling in the sticky air, ice cream dribbling down their fingers. She imagines Axel's long fingers sliding past Roxas's lips, pressing the blue droplets against his pallet until the boy sucks hard in response; she imagines little soft, wet noises like the ones she makes in her room late at night, teeth gnashing and fingers stroking faster, and slower, a tango of highs and lows like deep breaths after submersion.

But sometimes, she imagines things she knows aren't tangible, things that duck and weave through her conscious and cloud her mind with incense smoke. Sometimes she can hear a voice that isn't her own slog forward from her throat. Sometimes the bitter smell of little girl perfume hits her senses, cloying and saccharine-sweet like white spun sugar. Sometimes her hands grow an untapped confidence, pressing and excavating deep into her body, trailing small fingers down secret places inside until kaleidoscopes play on the backs of her eyelids.

The last few times she does it, Xion's lips form names she doesn't know, and for once, she doesn't imagine riding Axel's long fingers buried deep inside her, or sucking Roxas's tongue into her mouth until she can hardly breathe. Instead, there is genuine laughter and a smell of brine, chalk stained fingers and cornsilk hairs twined between her fingers.

She awakens to nausea and a throbbing heat between her legs, stammering words and names and promises and threats until her voice is gone, until all she can hear is the pound of a surf, and watercolours stain the backs of her teeth.


	5. v) axel, roxas

**post traumatic stress disorder.**

his is a face of angles and geometry  
like the functions on the homework roxas knows he has yet to do  
and he can't help but stare, eyes mapping the roman nose and  
pointed chin, because in reality, everything about this man is sharp and  
carved like a scythe, and when his mind makes the connection,  
roxas remembers flowers. the synapses fire again,  
and the flowers turn to ash.

the man's voice is like velvet through a meat grinder,  
rasping consonants like he's stumbled from a house fire,  
a smoker's drawl coating sweet, syrupy tones, a walking contradiction.  
he's an anomaly, with long extremities like the monsters  
parents tell their children at twilight to keep them rooted to their beds.  
there's a strange beauty to the incongruity of his shapes,  
the inverted triangular blotches like he's pressed bruises in the taut flesh,  
displaced dark circles from sleep deprivation.

and his eyes – roxas looks at those eyes and he can almost  
taste a sea-salt ice cream bar against his palate, so he swallows  
around the tumor growing in his throat, hiccuping pathetically  
like a little boy trying hard not to cry.

he has no memory of this man, but he still chokes hard around his breath  
when the man is gone – so hard, he feels like he's been clapped on the back,  
the wind knocked from his lungs.

—_well, come on! you're still kind of a zombie._

hayner has to drag him from the struggle ring, his face wet and  
his shoulders heaving and his lips forming words far out of context,  
like a half-remembered dream.

—_like i asked. know-it-all. _


End file.
